A variety of curved or contoured, load carrying structural elements may be formed from composite materials. These structural elements may be formed by laying up multiple plies of fiber reinforced resin material in which the fibers may be unidirectional within the ply. In some cases, it may be difficult for the unidirectional fibers to follow the contours of the structural member. In order to avoid wrinkling of the plies as they are laid up, existing processes may use hand layup techniques to place and then form the plies in place. In some cases, braided preforms may be used in conjunction with infusion processes to achieve wrinkle free ply layup. In still another technique, short segments of unidirectional composite materials may be laid up by hand over a tool in order to collectively form a single ply. These existing processes are labor intensive, rely on operator skill and are time consuming.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method of manufacturing curved composite structural elements which addresses one or more of the issues discussed above.